Re: [Haskell-cafe] In-place modification

On 10/07/07, Alex Queiroz wrote:

Hallo,

On 7/10/07, Hugh Perkins wrote:

...

On 7/8/07, Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

I was wittering on about stream fusion and how great it is, and I got a message from Mr C++.

(Mr C++ develops commercial games, and is obsessed with performance. For him, the only way to achieve the best performance is to have total control over every minute detail of the implementation. He sees Haskell is a stupid language that can never be fast. It seems he's not alone...)

Just a random observation: the competition for Haskell is not really C or C++. C is basically dead;

20 years from now people will still be saying this...

I highly doubt that. For two reasons: 1. People can only cling to unproductive and clumsy tools for so long (we don't write much assembly any more...). Capitalism works to ensure this; people who are willing to switch to more efficient tools will put the rest out of business (if they really are more efficient). 2. The many-core revolution that's on the horizon. While I personally think that the productivity argument should be enough to "make the switch", the killer-app (the app that will kill C, that is :-)) is concurrency. C is just not a tractable tool to program highly concurrent programs, unless the problem happens to be highly amenable to concurrency (web servers etc.). We need *something* else. It may not be Haskell, but it will be something (and it will probably be closer to Haskell than C!). -- Sebastian Sylvan +44(0)7857-300802 UIN: 44640862